The Universe and Etc!

It’s exciting to start a fresh new blog project. It’s kind of like your first day in class with a new pencil and a binder with blank sheets of paper. Even as late as graduate school at Harvard I always found that first day of class exciting and filled with such promise.

You have probably GOOGLEd me by now and discovered I am a professional astronomer and educator. No I am obviously not one of those famous ones you may know by name. There are thousands of astronomers and physicists in this country, many of them far more famous than I am, but chances are you have never actually met one. Even fewer people have astronomers as members of their families!

So here I am, one of those back-roads professional astronomers who has also spent a lifetime studying space and delving deeply into the nuances of the physical world. If you decide to make it a habit of reading my blogs, you may be pleasantly surprised how a slightly different perspective might help you see the world around you a bit more clearly. I hope you will at least appreciate the connections that I see, and why they have been such a source of joy and wonderment to me all my life. As they say, it is not the destination that matters but the journey!

I have always been interested in science: the exploration of the physical world. My mother used to tell me that when she would take me out into the fragrant spruce forests surrounding my hometown Karlskoga in Sweden, she would always have to empty out the rocks in my stroller that I collected along the way. This evolved into a progression of interests leading to a passion for astronomy by 5th Grade.

But as I was exploring the hard facts and theories of astronomy and physics, it was hard for me to give up my interests in ESP and UFOs. For you see, well into middle school I used to plot the positions of UFO sightings on a map of the USA on my bedroom wall, and marvel at the descriptions of the many sightings reported in newspapers and magazines. By high school, I was reading Carl Sagan’s ‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’, but I was also reading von Daniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods’ and Frank Edwards ‘Stranger than Science’. As a Junior in college, I had my own experience of sighting a UFO in the twilight sky. I also developed an interest in ESP because my Swedish mother beguiled me with many family stories of spirit sightings and telepathic incidents during my early childhood. In high school, my friends and I conducted séances…which [fortunately?] failed, and I had my own experiences with family ghosts and inexplicable events.

Then something peculiar happened around age 23 when I was beginning my Senior Year at UC Berkeley working on my degree in astronomy. By then, these interests in ESP and UFOs had subsided and simply vanished from the palette of issues I wanted to keep up with. What had happened?

As I became more steeped in science, its history, its many spectacular successes, and endless rounds of homework to learn physics from the inside out, I spent less and less time with ideas that entertained, but had far less substance and productivity to them. At some point, the hard data and objective mathematical rigor of science became a far more compelling story than the endless presentations of subjective evidence from ESP and UFO enthusiasts. It seemed to me that there was not one shred of hard evidence about ESP and UFOs that could not be dismissed as wishful thinking, unsubstantiated anecdotes, statistical variation, or out-right fakery.

In science, advances are made when data is obtained under controlled, repeatable conditions by parties whose only goal is to collectively create an accurate model of how the world works. I decided in college that this was drastically different from ‘ghost chasers’ and UFO hoaxers, who often flooded these subjects for fame and personal gain. But there was one subject area that I immediately gravitated to, that replaced all of these entertaining ideas: Brain research.

I am going to try to explain advances in our understanding of both the physical world and our mental world in a series of blogs that my non-scientist mother would have enjoyed reading. If you want more extensive details, you are free to GOOGLE the words and topics and look to other professionals for explanations who are also popularizers. I will recommend their insights and explanations as my blogs develop.

So where do we start?

Well, for my next few blogs, let’s begin with the brain and how we perceive and make sense of the world around us. That, after all, seems to be the biggest ingredient in creating a rational picture of the world around us.

Thanks Todd! In time I hope to cover some of those great questions we used to ponder on Mt. Diablo when we were in high school. I’ll never forget seeing star clusters and nebulae through the telescopes we built !!